Seré Halverson - The Underside of Joy

Or maybe he had just stuck it back there with some of her other belongings, not wanting to deal with any of it. Maybe he’d forgotten about it all.

There were other things that I could bet he didn’t care about. Old bottles of makeup. A box of tampons. A worn copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting. Some loose change and a brush still tangled with golden hair.

No, this was not a shrine. This was a box packed in haste, stuck away, forgotten.

I should have stopped then and closed up the closet, returned the cabinet to the wall, the drawers to the cabinet. But I didn’t. I opened another box. And another. These held Annie’s old baby clothes — almost everything tiny and pink or peach and white, little cotton mementos of an era I could never be part of. There was even a onesie with little ducks that I recognized. I’d bought the same one at GapKids during my first pregnancy. I’d left it hanging in the nursery closet when I left Henry. Where was it now? Had he packed it away in a box of other things I’d left behind? More likely, he had given it away.

Paige and I were both pregnant at the same time. When I’d first met them, I figured out that one of my babies would be the same age as Annie, almost exactly. I found Annie’s baby book, which I had never seen, though that was one of the few things I’d asked Joe about. He’d shrugged and said he wasn’t sure where it was. Did Paige stick it in this box, planning to retrieve it someday? It was homemade, covered in pink and white bunny fabric, with her name, Annie Rose Capozzi, and the date of her birth, November 7, 1992, cross-stitched in the centre. I thought about not opening it — for about two seconds. I knew nothing in it would make me feel better. But I looked anyway, at the photos of Paige, glowing even in labour, and Joe and Paige and Annie snuggled in a hospital bed, surrounded by pink bouquets and balloons, Joe’s and Paige’s smiles equally big, connecting them to their child like the two symmetrical sides of an anchor.

I flipped through more pages of Annie, and Annie with Marcella, with Joe Sr with Frank and Lizzie and David, but no pictures of Paige, not until Easter, five months later, where she resumed her place again, resurrected from oblivion. There weren’t many pictures of Joe, since he was the one who’d taken most of them. Maybe that was worse, because these photos reflected what he saw, what he loved — his presence in them stronger than if he’d been standing in the middle of each one. The look on Paige’s face, that type of secret smile shared with only one other person on the planet. And Annie in her arms.

Later that night, I sat in bed trying to pay too many of our household bills without enough bank balance. Mostly, I was waiting for Annie and Zach to call me. Callie lay at the end of the mattress, snoring, jerking her legs as she dug up dream gophers. I tried to sort all my mind’s spinning into some sort of logical sequence, but to no avail. I pulled out the nightstand drawer and rummaged through it until I found my scratch pad and pen. In my handwriting were the words chicken feed and rhubarb seeds.

Yes, it was true. La-tee-da. My life had once seemed that simple, like the title of a silly song, the kind you’d sing on road trips: ‘Oh, I’ve got chicken feed, and rhubarb seeds, and a smile that’s a mile long. I’ve got a boy and a girl and a husband that’s a pearl, and a smile that’s a mile long.’

Joe took care of the groceries, filling bags of whatever we needed at the end of the day. The post office was next to the store, so he always picked up the mail. And when the store was slow, he did the books. Apparently, he’d had a lot of time to do the books.

I’d stepped into his life and had imposed little of my own onto his. I’d felt like a walking tomb that had been overly excavated, ready to collapse in on itself; there hadn’t been any life left in me then. Stumbling into Joe and the kids — a ready-made family with a mommy-size gaping hole for me to fill. I hadn’t questioned any of it. Why question what’s so clearly destiny?

Joe and I went from not knowing each other’s names one day to raising a family the next. We never went through the phases our friends did — the long, drawn-out exhales and rolled eyes, the ‘I’ll do it, then.’ I eagerly jumped first when it came to the kids. And after months of going it alone, Joe usually let me.

We’d been together three years. But how well had we really known each other? Perhaps not as well as I’d assumed. Henry and I were married seven years, but even after all we’d gone through together, I never felt I was privy to a different Henry than the one others knew. The conversations he had with me could have easily been had with his colleagues at work, his baseball buddies, or his mother — depending on the topic. Nothing was reserved for only us, except when it came to trying to have a baby. But when we decided we were done trying, and I wanted to talk about adoption, Henry changed the subject. We were back to brief discussions concerning lab rats, the Padres, his father’s hernia.

Joe and I loved to talk, our conversations twisting and turning from something incredible one of the kids had done to how great the eggplants looked to a poem about a blue heron he’d read in a journal. I thought he was one of the most interesting people I’d ever met. He was funny, creative, intuitive, artistic. After Sergio died, Joe quit college to help his dad, felt it his duty to honour his grandfather’s wishes after all Sergio had been through. Joe gave up his dream of becoming a photojournalist, and photography became his hobby, where he chose to capture the best of what the world offered, always seeking out the most flattering angles and light. I’d loved that about him. But now I wondered at all he refused to look at, and the easy way his filtered perspective complemented my own.

I picked up Paige’s business card. Callie stretched, lifted her head, then let it flop back on the mattress. She resumed snoring. I cleared my throat and practiced.

‘Hello? Paige? This is Ella?’ Too questioning. Too insecure.

‘Hello, Paige. It’s Ella. I’d like to speak to Annie now.’

No. Too insistent. I needed to sound light, as if I really didn’t have a care in the world.

‘Hi, Paige. (It is Paige, isn’t it?) Hey, it’s Ella. Is Annie around?’ I dialled and hung up twice before I let it ring.

‘Hello. You’ve reached the cell phone voice mail of Paige Capozzi. Please leave a message, and remember, when it’s time to stage, call Paige…’ and a beep.

I was going to hang up, but then I thought she probably had caller ID so I started talking. ‘Um. Hi. It’s Ella. Ella Beene? And you know… I was just thinking, um… about Annie and Zach. And I wanted to say good night. Gosh. I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t there to tuck them in. I… I think it was Joe and my three-year anniversary? When we drove up to Mendocino for the —’ Beep.

Wait. Didn’t she have one of those press-pound-and-erase-your-message options? I pushed buttons. I shook the phone. I said, ‘Hello? Hello?’ Nothing. I hung up.

The phone rang, startling me because it was still in my lap.

‘Hi, Mommy.’ It was Zach, his voice like sweet relief filling my head, my body. I hadn’t realized how tense I’d been, how scared, really, that something horrible had happened. My new fear of bad news.

‘Hi, honey! Are you having fun?’

‘No. I wanna come home. NOW. ’

‘Oh, Zach. What’s wrong?’

‘I want YOU. ’ I could see him as clearly as if he stood in front of me, the way he held the phone with both hands, Bubby lodged under his arm, his belly out, knees probably bent, heels together, toes apart and facing out, like some sort of ungracefully adorable plié.